"Ain't I the dub? Sure you can't leave her. We gotta stick by her now, dearie. 'Ain't we? 'Ain't we?"
A red seepage of blood surged across his face and under his hair. Beneath his little hedge of mustache his lips quivered as if at their own daring.
"We gotta stick by her, dearie."
All her senses swam, nor could she control the fluttering of her hands.
"Oh—Mr. Meltzer—Max!"
"What you and poor old Dee Dee need is some of this spring air. Gee! wouldn't I love to take you—and her down the river to-night on one of them new Coney boats? Gee! would I? Just you and—and her."
"Max—oh, Max dearie!"
"HEADS"
By the great order of things which decreed that about the time Herod, brother to no man, died, Jesus, brother to all men, should be born; and that Rabelais, moral jester, should see light the very year that orthodox Louis XI passed on, by that same metaphysical scheme reduced to its lowliest, Essman's drop-picture machine, patent applied for, was completed the identical year that, for Rudolph Pelz, the rainy-day skirt slumped from a novelty to a commodity.
At a very low tide in the affairs of the Novelty Rainy Day Skirt Company, Canal Street, that year of our Lord, 1898, when letter-head stationery was about to be rewritten and the I-haven't-seen-you-since-last-century jocosity was about to be born, Rudolph Pelz closed his workaday by ushering out Mr. Emil Hahn, locking his front door after his full force of two women machine-stitchers, and opening a rear door upon his young manhood's estate. A modest-enough holding in the eyes of you or me as beholders; but for the past week not an evening upon opening that door but what tears rushed to his throat, which he laughed through, for shame of them.